Two years after the TV series concluded, Callan was back, of sorts, with this cinematic feature film. I say of sorts, because the central plot of this big screen spin-off ought to be familiar to any Callan fan as it's a reworking of his very first adventure (and his creator James Mitchell's novel); A Magnum for Schneider.
Whenever anyone mentions the antithesis of James Bond, it's invariably Michael Caine's down-at-heel agent Harry Palmer who is considered the prime example. But Palmer wasn't an assassin like Bond, so the suggestion doesn't quite work, however much I love that character. The real antithesis to the sophisticated and clubbable agent with a licence to kill is in fact David Callan, brought vividly to life by Edward Woodward. Just like Bond, Callan is an efficient trained killer, but it is there that the similarities end. Callan is a former soldier and an ex convict. He's working class, far from glamourous, prone to cynicism and disillusionment and deeply troubled by his conscience. He's an expert marksman who kills because his superiors - specifically the boss codenamed Hunter (played here by Eric Porter but, in the TV series, by several actors; the character's interchangeability rivalling The Prisoner's Number 2 and pre-empting Bond's M) - know that he's good at it, but he doesn't really like it and he can't ever leave his job because those very same superiors would order his own death, probably at the hands of the eager Toby Meres (played by Peter Egan here, but played initially by Peter Bowles and then, brilliantly, by Anthony Valentine); an 'Old Etonian Al Capone' who is effectively a Bond character depicted without the sympathy that Ian Fleming or the Eon films afford him. The shadow of Callan loomed large over Woodward's subsequent career - indeed, it was thanks to that programme that he was given the lead role of The Equalizer, - the role that made his name in the US - because the creators lived in England in the early '70s and fondly remembered his performance in (the much harder edged and gritty) Callan.
But what of the film itself? Well it's solid enough, but lacks any of the real flair required to ensure it stands out in the crowded market of cinema. Being a direct remake of a previous story doesn't help either, as it makes it all seem rather surplus to requirements. Mitchell opens the action out - ensuring that the original 50 minute tale accommodates a 90 minute run time - but it could be argued that it bodges the opportunity this gives it, taking far too long to actually get going. Mitchell's screenplay and Don Sharp's direction prefers to focus more on atmosphere than action and, whilst the former was the winning ingredient of the series, you get the feeling they ought to have ramped up the action a little more to thrill cinema audiences. There are a few physical skirmishes though; a punch-up between Callan and Meres, a cat-and-mouse car chase and an 'iron fists' fatal punch Callan employs against Dave 'Darth Vader/Green Cross Code Man' Prowse. This particular sequence is striking; there's a long and initially unexplained set-up to it which features Callan spending his nights pummelling his fists into a bowl of wet sand and, when the fatal punch comes, it's shown in a peculiar psychedelic solarised effect that really dates the film. The downbeat, everyday sequences are more successful and still stand up today; Callan and Lonely's meets in dreary pubs, Callan throwing Hunter's agents off his scent across London, Lonely secreting the Magnum revolver in a Lord Kitchener adorned bag of sprouts and his neighbours banging on the pipes to alert him when a police car arrives in the street.
What does work about Callan is the performances. Both Edward Woodward and Russell Hunter return to their roles as the jaded Callan as his malodorous sidekick Lonely and it's a delight to see them play off one another once more. There's also the return of an occasional supporting character from the original series in the shape of the department's MO Dr Snell played by Clifford Rose. There's a really good scene in which the coldblooded Snell explains how - through a mixture of hypnotism and hallucinogenics - he's deliberately brought about a psychiatric breakdown on a witness to Callan's murder of Prowse's character to ensure there are no comebacks upon the department. It's a repulsive moment played with no compunction that says much about the ruthless efficiency many of us would suspect our government's intelligence services would possess and Rose, who went on to terrify the nation as SS Officer Kessler in TV's Secret Army and its spin-off Kessler, is suitably and quietly chilling in the scene.
Eric Porter does a good job as Hunter but Peter Egan is less successful in bringing Meres to life and struggles to step out from the shadows of the great Anthony Valentine. Still, it's quite interesting to see Callan square up to Big Breadwinner Hog, even if I did keep expecting Egan to say 'Hullo Martin' as he would often do in his other most famous role as Paul in the 80s BBC sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles. Carl Mohner of Rififi fame is Callan's target, the former Nazi, Schneider, but he doesn't possess the same charisma that Joseph Furst has in the original TV play. The beautiful Catherine Schell stars as Scneider's girlfriend and lends the film a bit of glamour but Callan remains, like the series, a mostly sexless affair (so ignore the bikini clad babe who is presumably Schell in the poster art, because there's none of that here - neither is there a helicopter and the train is pushing it too). There are also several familiar faces in the cast, including Kenneth Griffith, Don Henderson and Nadim Sawalha.
Watchable but by no means a necessity if you have the series, what ultimately scuppers this big screen spin-off for me is the inappropriately jaunty harmonica score from Wilfred Josephs. Compare that to the famous Jack Trombey theme 'This Man Alone' from the TV series, complete with its swinging lightbulb, and it's a strange decision to make.
Mention Hammer Films to anyone and the first thing that comes to mind is horror. But Hammer were actually responsible for a variety of film genres and styles and in the late '50s and early '60s they produced two war movies that proved to be as spine chilling and unflinching as anything they produced featuring Dracula or Frankenstein's Monster. These films were 1958's The Camp On Blood Island, and its 1964 sequel, The Secret of Blood Island.
"Never before has any film portrayed with such honesty and accuracy, the tormented sufferings, brutality, heroism, and degradation that were the lot of the POW under his demonic slave masters, the Japanese. I believe everyone in the so-called civilised world should see this magnificent picture, absorb and digest it, and realise that this could happen again. For the animal minds of our former captors will never change and all ex-POWs know this"
So wrote the journalist Leo Rawlings on the release of Hammer's hit 1958 movie, The Camp on Blood Island. Strong words, but perhaps understandably so given his own experiences as a POW in Singapore.
Unfortunately there hasn't been any mainstream or widespread ability to take Rawlings' advice and see, absorb and digest the film for thirty-eight years now. Despite The Camp On Blood Island being televised in Britain on a handful of occasions throughout the 1970s, the film that was one of the most popular hits in British cinema in 1958, has effectively been banned from our screens since 1979, presumably (and at the risk of sounding like an uber twunt Farage-a-like here) on the grounds of political correctness. Granted, it's trying and deeply regrettable to see so many white British actors (Ronald Radd, Lee Montague and, perhaps least convincing of all, Michael Ripper!) don offensive make-up and accents to play Japanese soldiers but, given that so many of the films of this era indulged in such dubious casting and still manage to get broadcast today, one is left to wonder if the real bone of contention is in fact the light in which the Japanese are portrayed in the film. Hammer certainly live up to their reputation for X rated filmmaking here, depicting the cold blooded executions and brutal torture of British POWs at the hands of their captors in an unflinching manner (along with the same lashings of 'Kensington gore' they indulged in for their horror output), but the film's truth - it's wholly unempathetic and hardline depiction of the Japanese forces - isn't in any way different from any number of Japanese POW films, from the recent Unbroken and The Railway Man right the way back to this film's more contemporary stablemate, David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai, which is rightly regarded as a classic. Perhaps there's another reason then why this rattlingly good film, an ostensible Hammer 'B movie', hasn't seen the light of day for almost forty years - snobbery?
The film was said to have been based on a true story that Hammer's Anthony Nelson Keys had heard from someone who had been a Japanese POW. Seeing the potential for a movie, Keys took the story to Michael Carreras who commissioned a script from John Manchip White. The film went into production in the summer of 1957 with Val Guest as director and boasts an impressive cast, including André Morell (who also starred in Lean's POW epic) as the senior British officer, Carl Möhner, Barbara Shelley and the perpetually pained looking Richard Wordsworth, the star of Hammer's The Quatermass Xperiment, as a deeply convincing near-starved and heroic prisoner.
Unfortunately, whilst The Camp on Blood Island proved to be a neglected gem, its sequel, The Secret of Blood Island, most emphatically isn't.
This belated offering from Hammer came some six years after the success of their first foray to Blood Island and has proved to be equally little seen since its release; indeed, I can't find any transmission details for this one at all on BBC Genome (though it may have appeared on ITV as some reviewers on IMDB recall watching it on TV at least once in the '70s) Unlike its predecessor, it has not been released to DVD, making it all the more scarce, but it is available to watch online. Rather than a sequel, which would have been difficult given The Camp on Blood Island is set as the war ends, The Secret of Blood Island is, in fact, a prequel set around a year earlier. Filmed in colour, it stars a handful of actors from the original film but, confusingly, they are playing completely different characters. Those returning included Barbara Shelley, Edwin Richfield, Lee Montague and Michael Ripper.
Unfortunately, the whole film is simply ill advised. The original film was said to have been based on a true story related to the production team at Hammer by a former POW and, whilst the veracity of such a claim could be doubted, what wasn't in any doubt was the intentions behind such a film; The Camp On Blood Island may have been, to quote one critic, the examination of an open wound in Post War Britain, but it was one that was perhaps required. This film may have toned the brutality down a little, but there's no denying its exploitative credentials as it is clearly a cash-in with so little to say as evinced by the unconvincing and dumb narrative from screenwriter John Gilling.
Barbara Shelley takes centre stage as an SOE agent shot down over Malaya and discovered by a work party of British POWs who agree to hide her in the camp until she's able to continue on with her mission. Quite how Shelley is meant to evade recognition by their Japanese captors with the sole disguise of an elfin cut and side-parting care of the camp barber is beyond me! Nevertheless, it's up to the likes of Jack Hedley, Charles Tingwell and Bill 'Compo' Owen, along with the aforementioned returnees Richfield and Montague, to ensure the game isn't up. Presiding over them is the camp commandant played by Patrick Wymark - and if you thought Ronald Radd's heavily made up turn in the previous film was offensive and unbelievable, just wait until you see Wymark - and Michael Ripper as his sadistic lieutenant. Quite why Ripper was 'promoted' when his turn as a Japanese soldier was so laughably unconvincing in the first film is beyond me, but to his credit he has improved a little with this more central role and is leaps ahead of Wymark.
The film was directed by Quentin Lawrence, who has none of the skill of The Camp On Blood Island's helmer, Val Guest in the same way that Gilling has none of that earlier film's author Jon Manchip White's flair for telling such a story. I'd also quibble over the decision to place the end of the film at the front in the form of a pre-credit sequence, which adds nothing and effectively gives away everything. Unlike it's predecessor, this film failed to make much of an impact with audiences and so its retreat into relative obscurity is no real loss.
Notable for being Vanessa Redgrave's cinematic debut, Behind The Mask is a fairly accurate and engrossing, albeit somewhat slow-moving, look at the life of a newly qualified surgeon and the old boys network that exists within the NHS.
Tony Britton stars as our hero, Philip Selwood, a freshly qualified surgical registrar on the firm of the respected but ailing consultant Sir Arthur Benson Gray, played by Michael Redgrave. Selwood is also engaged to his mentor's daughter, Pamela (Vanessa Redgrave) which makes them rather tight, until an issue of malpractice within the hospital rears its head.
Carl Möhner co-stars as Dr Carl Romek, a Polish anaesthetist who is something of an outsider from 'The Pack' (the title of the novel by John Rowan Wilson that this film is based on) whom Selwood takes pity on and becomes rather friendly with. It's clear from the off that Romek is a troubled individual; he has a tragic past thanks to his time in a concentration camp and has a habit of staring off into the distance with a faraway look in his eyes as he talks about himself, so it comes as no surprise when his former girlfriend (Brenda Bruce) reveals to Selwood that Romek is a dope-fiend, hooked on barbiturates since an accident in the camp during the war. He assures Selwood he is clean, but it's a lie and the pair enter theatre to operate on a patient, leading to devastating consequences that threaten to tear Selwood and Pamela apart...
Behind The Mask may be a trifle stiff and dated looking (not helped by the green tinge to the antiquated colour film) but its exploration of medical surgery and the old boys network/'the pack' feels suitably and worryingly authentic. It's certainly more believable and interesting than any current episode of Holby City! Of particular interest is a scene which features an example of early open-heart surgery, though quite why the observation camera prefers to concentrate on the perspiring brow of Redgrave rather than what his hands are actually doing makes a mockery of the realistic edge much of the film is striving for.
It's rather lovely to see Michael and Vanessa Redgrave playing opposite each other, replicating their real life father and daughter relationship. Indeed there's a great cast on display here overall, even though some of them have very little to do (hello, Lionel Jeffries) I especially liked Ian Bannen as a whitecoat forever cadging cigarettes off his colleagues. Oh and eagle eyed viewers will spot a certain William Roache aka Ken Barlow pacing around, pulling on cigarettes in a couple of early scenes as a young doctor. I may be wrong but I think this might be his only other credit aside from Coronation Street which he has been in since the very first episode in 1960.
Kudos too for realistically conveying the ethnic diversity inherent within the British medical world and how the NHS welcomed immigrants from the commonwealth and the like because of their talents and dedication; something which has stupidly come under threat thanks to the Brexit vote.
